Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #59 talks about HDR (High dynamic range) pho­tog­ra­phy in an inter­view with fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher and HDR instruc­tor Joseph Car­tright. In this pod­cast we dis­cuss how to cre­ate an HDR pho­to­graph and be warned, this is an inter­me­di­ate level pod­cast. That said, Joseph reviews many of the terms that con­fuse dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phers these days, so part of the pod­cast (espe­cially the begin­ning) reviews con­cepts rel­e­vant to all dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy. In a nut­shell an HDR image is made of 2 or more shots where the same scene is pho­tographed with brack­eted expo­sures and then put together with soft­ware in order to extend the dynamic range (get addi­tional infor­ma­tion in the high­lights, mid­tones and shad­ows) of the scene.

Here’s a few terms as explained by Joseph that are good to absorb right away;
– Lat­i­tude — Refers to how much you can be ‘off’ of the cor­rect expo­sure and still have a usable image.
– Dynamic range — Refers to the usable range of data you can cap­ture between the high­lights and the shad­ows before you lose data. (If you over­ex­pose too much there is no data in the whites or high­lights and if you under­ex­pose too much there is no data in the blacks or shadows).

Comments

Great pod­cast, I learned a lot, mainly that I’m not ready to try HDR quite yet. Maybe when I have more time. Even though I won’t be try­ing it, the tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion of dynamic range helped me a lot. I’m going to have to go back and lis­ten to that again.

Great pod­cast! I wanted to men­tion to oth­ers that in some sit­u­a­tions you may not have a tri­pod to take your mul­ti­ple expo­sures. But I never let this stop me. Hand-held HDR does work with a lit­tle help from pho­to­shop. Pho­to­shop has a cool fea­ture called Auto-Align Lay­ers that you can use to align your expo­sures before pro­cess­ing through Pho­tomatix. Bring you expo­sures into Pho­to­shop as sep­a­rate lay­ers and run Auto-Align Lay­ers. Pho­to­shop does a great job. Then save the indi­vid­ual lay­ers as sep­a­rate files before pro­cess­ing in Pho­tomatix. You can’t replace the sharp­e­ness you get from using a tri­pod, but you won’t miss the shot either.

Also Pho­tomatix has a facil­ity to do what’s called pseudo-HDR where it will process a sin­gle RAW file and allow you to run the tone-mapping func­tion on your image. This is a great way to exper­i­ment with the tone-mapping fea­tures in Photomatix.